What do we evaluate when we evaluate creativity: Revisiting the conceptualization of creativity

Creativity evaluation is a theoretically interesting and practically important topic. In the current creativity research, the dominant approach to the study of this topic posits that people are looking for novelty and usefulness when evaluating creativity. This two dimensional evaluation scheme is a direct application of the conventional conceptualization of creativity as the generation of ideas or products that are both novel and useful. However, this approach has limitations in both conceptual clarity and empirical rigor. In this paper, we discussed the issues with the “novelty and usefulness” evaluation scheme and examined how well it accounted for judgments of creativity empirically. More importantly, we proposed an alternative approach to investigating creativity evaluation with a process- oriented conceptualization of creativity: creativity as a process of perspective- change. Two studies were conducted to provide initial evidence in support of our view.